In Us We Trust?

Pollsters, pundits, and public intellectuals identify declining levels of trust in America’s civic institutions as a threat to social and political order. Public opinion data bear out that trust has indeed waned in recent decades. The great majority of citizens in the early 1960s broadly viewed the nation’s institutions as reliable and well-functioning; today most people view them with skepticism. Confidence in government, the legal system, the news media, the medical system, public schools, and banks has significantly declined, and today all these institutions are distrusted by a majority of Americans.

One important factor—albeit not always in straightforward ways—in the declining trust is technological change. The democratization of knowledge and information via the Internet and social media has destroyed institutional monopolies on truth and provided potent tools for destabilizing and competing with the authority of traditional experts. In Who Can You Trust?, Rachel Botsman discusses these technological forces in terms of irreversible social transformation. “Institutional trust, taken on faith, kept in the hands of a few and operating behind closed doors, wasn’t designed for the digital age.”

Botsman, firmly in the grip of a theory, divides human history into three stages. In the beginning, we had community-based “local” trust, then we progressed to the “institutional trust” of “an organized industrial society.” Now we are moving beyond rules and hierarchies to a “distributed trust” made possible, above all, by Internet-based commerce that is “rewriting the rules of human relationships” and ushering in “the third, biggest trust revolution in the history of humankind.”

How she arrives at this ranking is beyond my ken. But readers applying traditional standards of coherence and clarity to Who Can You Trust? will never get through it; the book is better approached as a spooky, TED-talkin’ voyage into the zeitgeist of creative-class techno-optimism.

It all starts with the author’s wedding in rural Massachusetts on September 14, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. “A couple of friends who were senior executives at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs apologized for having to leave, summonsed [sic] to ‘red alert’ emergency meetings. It would be a race against the clock to avoid the blind panic that would surely happen when the markets opened.” And so, her “wedding day, rich with tradition, also marked the downfall of something more profound: public trust in institutions.” (Although not, one hopes, the institution of marriage.)

Early chapters follow a simple formula—first an illustrative anecdote, then “here’s why it matters”—to demonstrate how Internet-based companies like Alibaba, BlaBlaCar, Airbnb, Uber, and TransferWise have enabled a huge expansion in the variety and scale of commerce. For example, Botsman starts one chapter with a story about how a nanny that her mother hired when Botsman was a child turned out to be a drug dealer, which leads nicely to an explanation of UrbanSitter, an online platform for vetting nannies via one’s Facebook or LinkedIn network, thus presumably keeping creeps away from the kids. For Botsman, what all these companies have in common is their use of Internet platforms that facilitate “trust between strangers . . . a once unthinkable form of trust that has sprung up around the world.” It’s “the old village model of trust in one sense, except that the community is global in scale and some of its invisible reins are being pulled by Internet giants.” (Do not try to make sense of the metaphors.)

The scale, diversity, and novelty of Internet commerce is of course extraordinary, but the idea that it is best understood in terms of shifting patterns of trust is bizarre. What Botsman calls “distributed trust” is necessary for any commercial activity beyond barter. Innovations as diverse as notaries public, standardized weights and measures, paper currency, and railroads have each allowed an expansion of commerce among people who had never met one another. Indeed, to provide some relief from Who Can You Trust? I was simultaneously reading Francis Spufford’s new novel Golden Hill, the story of which hinges entirely on a problem of commerce and distributed trust. In the book’s opening pages, the hero arrives in New York in 1746 carrying a note for £1,000 that he cannot redeem because its validity is unverifiable. All manner of misadventure ensues. The plot device depends on a world of slow ships connecting distant lands; that particular problem of distributed trust was solved by the advent in the mid-19th century of the transatlantic telegraph.

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Botsman’s book does not shrink from tales of misadventure. From the Uber driver who goes on a killing spree to the “darknet”—the Internet’s safe space for the drug trade—to huge bitcoin heists, Botsman gradually reveals that pretty much every clever way to bring people together online to make money and expand the distribution of goods and services also means creating opportunities to subvert or exploit that cleverness for the gain of individuals, companies, and governments. The scariest example she mentions is China’s Social Credit System, a government-run initiative that by 2020 is supposed to rate and rank every Chinese citizen in terms of a range of economic, social, personal, and presumably political criteria. The more points you get for good behavior, the easier it will be to rent cars, take out loans, get faster Internet connectivity, find a job, travel abroad, and attract a similarly highly rated partner. As Botsman rightly puts it, this program represents “social control dressed up in some points-reward system.”

Still, Botsman bravely holds onto her theory. “I would not have written this book if I did not believe in the enormous potential of distributed trust to give people, even countries, the tools and power . . . to help us find ways through the treacherous storm of distrust we are currently only just weathering.” In support of such exhausted metaphors the book is infested with gratuitous neologisms like “trust blocker,” “trust engineer,” “trust leap,” “trust scar,” and “trust stack,” all of which are compiled in a glossary. But in the end it all seems like a rearguard action; Botsman’s final words are a halfhearted and regretful plea that we “stop and think before we automatically click, swipe, share and accept. To ask the right questions and to seek the right information that helps us to decide: Is this person, information or thing worthy of my trust?”

Botsman’s idea that the trust necessary for a well-functioning society can be created and maintained by online commercial exchange is at once frivolous and dangerous. It advances the techno-libertarian illusion that strong public institutions are not essential for civic order. But as the anthropologist Mary Douglas explained in her classic How Institutions Think, it’s the institutions themselves that create the very possibility of such order in the first place. Institutions stabilize ideas about the world that people can share and have confidence in. Douglas showed that trust that’s worthy of the name cannot emerge from “mutual convenience in multiple transactions” but must be built on a “sameness” of understanding that allows social cohesion and contributes to the belief that one’s actions will achieve one’s aims. Who Can You Trust? has everything backwards. In bemoaning the erosion of privacy and autonomy that accompanies the online world of “distributed trust,” Botsman declares: “The real questions about the future of trust are not technological or economic; they are ethical.” Yet where will such ethical questions be raised, debated, and adjudicated if not in the very institutions that she seems so willing to consign to obsolescence?

Daniel Sarewitz is a professor of science and society at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation and Society and the co-director of the university’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.

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